It's usually a good sign when you sit down with a new piece of software and the first words out of your mouth are 'wow'. That's just what happened after installing East West's Hollywood Strings Diamond Edition. This powerful virtual instrument truly takes the art of sampled string production to a new level. If you're looking for a top-tier software instrument to recreate strings, this is the one to turn to.

— Pro Sound News

HOLLYWOOD STRINGS virtual (software) instrument — a collection of 44.1khz 24-bit string instruments with unprecedented control over sound and performance, all supplied on a hard drive for ease of installation. Hollywood Strings Gold Edition is 16-bit, with one mic positon (mid-tree, no divisi) and all articulations except bow change legato. HOLLYWOOD STRINGS has many groundbreaking features not found in any other collection. Finger position is, for the first time, controllable by the user, so you can play as far up the strings as you want, and get a fuller more romantic Hollywood sound. Vibrato intensity and extensive dynamics are controllable by the user.

Extensive multi-dynamic true legato has been sampled for all sections in three different categories: slurred, portamento, and bow change. This results in unsurpassed legato performance that has never been available. HOLLYWOOD STRINGS has five user-controllable mic positions, including main pickup (Decca tree), mid pickup, close pickup, surround pickup, and an alternate vintage circa 1945 RCA ribbon room pickup.

Instrumentation

All sections except the Basses were sampled with wide extended ranges including almost 4 octaves for violins.

• Multiple finger positions for all sections including open strings• 3 unique styles of legato interval sampling, including never-before-sampled bow change legato, slurred legato, and portamento sliding legato, sampled at 3, 3 and 2 dynamics respectively, all with speed control. That's 8 passes of legato intervals, all sampled in long format so each note has time to breath. Basses only have slurred legato.• Up- and down-bowed sustains, all at 4 finger positions, at least one full octave on each string: